Campus History

The legacy of Arcadia University began in 1853, when Sylvania (Jones) Stevens and Juliet A. (Poundstone) Avery, along with several other students, left their family homes and accompanied Rev. Sheridan Baker to the Beaver Female Seminary in Beaver, Pennsylvania. After graduating in 1856, they were the first students to receive diplomas from the seminary. This book concentrates on the Glenside, Pennsylvania, campus up until the school’s name and status change to Arcadia University in 2001 and covers the many shifts in the school’s name and location.

Kenneth Samen graduated in 1992 with a bachelor of arts degree in communications from Beaver College/Arcadia University. For the past 27 years, Samen has worked for Prudential Insurance Company of America. This is Samen’s third title with Arcadia Publishing. His research for this book led him into his personal postcard collection and the university’s archives and, externally, to historical societies and institutional collections to locate images and items that have not been seen in years. Dr. Ajay Nair is a nationally recognized expert in student affairs and an accomplished scholar of social justice, race, and ethnicity. Dr. Nair was appointed president of Arcadia University in April 2018 and inaugurated in October 2018.

Wells College, founded in 1868 by businessman Henry Wells, boasts a storied history that spans over a century and a half. Using images and ephemera from the Wells College Archive and Special Collections, Tiffany Raymond, MLIS, and Daniel G. Renfrow, PhD, illustrate the college's rich history and the unique traditions that continue to inspire generations of students to pursue knowledge, leadership, and positive change in the world.

Established as a women’s college in Aurora, New York, Wells fulfilled the founder’s dream of making a “College Home” for students while simultaneously pioneering women’s education, providing opportunities for intellectual growth and leadership long before women’s rights were fully recognized. Throughout this history, the college has adapted to the evolving needs of the students and the wider society, including transitioning to coeducation in 2005 to better serve a diverse student body. Wells College’s commitment to academic excellence, social responsibility, and community engagement remains unwavering, making it a beacon of higher education in the picturesque Finger Lakes region.

Tiffany Raymond, MLIS, is director of the Louis Jefferson Long Library at Wells

College and a member of the class of 2010. Daniel G. Renfrow, PhD, is an associate professor of sociology and chair of the Social Science Division at Wells College. 

Syracuse University details the beginnings of this historic school, describing its rise to present day prestige.

Syracuse University was founded in 1870 as a private, coeducational university in Syracuse, New York. Classes began the following year in temporary quarters until the university moved to its current location on ""The Hill"" in 1873, occupying the Hall of Languages, which is still the iconic center of SU. Syracuse University provides a photographic journey from the late 1800s to the present, highlighting its growth from a small Methodist college to a university of national importance with more than 20,000 students and over 240,000 living alumni. Always committed to diversity, SU has embraced opportunity--be it with the Syracuse-in-China program in the 1920s, the enrollment of thousands of veterans after World War II, or cofounding the Say Yes to Education scholarship program for urban schools. Championship football, basketball, and lacrosse teams have also brought prestige to SU, and fans around the nation and world ""bleed orange"" along with those who work, teach, or study at the university.

Discover America's first university through a unique collection of images, highlighting centuries of student life on and around campus.

By the time photography was invented in the 1830s, the University of Pennsylvania, America's first university, was nearly a century old. University of Pennsylvania, a unique photographic collection, focuses on the school's history at its present campus in West Philadelphia beginning shortly after the end of the Civil War and provides images of more than a century of student life inside and outside the classroom. In every category, from campus landmarks to the student body to the traditions that bind the community together, these photographs demonstrate the close connections between Penn's present and its past. They also reveal historical aspects of the Penn experience that have since vanished.

Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, was founded after the Civil War as a great experiment: a nonsectarian, coeducational institution where "any person can find instruction in any study."

In the mid-19th century, there were only a handful of colleges that accepted women and even fewer that were nonsectarian. The university charter specifically states that "persons of every religious denomination or of no religious denomination, shall be equally eligible to all offices and appointments." Today, with colleges of hotel management and labor relations added to the more traditional majors in liberal arts, engineering, business, agriculture, and architecture, Cornell - both an Ivy League university and state land-grant college - truly offers a diverse program of study for a diverse collection of students.

Join author Nancy Siegel as she recounts the history of Juniata College through the lens of vintage images.

Since its beginning in 1876, Juniata College has remained a rare and distinguished institution. It takes an equally exceptional collection of photographs to illustrate the college's proud history. The following photographs, many of them never before published, tells the story in eloquent detail. Juniata College explores the first fifty years of the history of Juniata, from its simple origin in one room over a printing shop to the 1920s as Juniata emerged into a leading liberal arts college. Juniata College is a campus tour that includes visits to buildings no longer standing, recreations of many forgotten traditions, and a special chapter highlighting the town of Huntingdon. Picture postcards and posed snapshots, together with excerpts from historical documents, reveal an engaging story told in an informative and elegant style.

Vassar College was founded in 1861, two miles from the banks of the Hudson River in Poughkeepsie by Matthew Vassar, a self-made businessman.

The college grew to confirm its founder's precedent-breaking vision that women would profit from intellectual opportunities in the liberal arts similar to those that Ivy League institutions had long offered the other gender. The college has grown and changed with the times, first countering Victorian prejudices that women were not suited for serious study, always leading the way as opportunities to broaden the spectrum of women's education developed. In the tumultuous decade of the 1960s, Vassar College again broke precedent, turning itself from a single-sex institution into one in which true coeducation exists. After 139 years, Vassar is poised for the changes under way and yet to come in the twenty-first century.

Since 1973, the Latin/Greek Institute (LGI) at the City University of New York has trained thousands of students in the classical languages. After 50 days of highly choreographed study, graduates of the Institute’s basic Latin and Greek programs—who enter with little or no prior knowledge—are able to engage in advanced reading courses and/or sit for graduate language exams. This is a remarkable feat made possible by a unique curricular model developed by the Institute’s visionary founder, Dr. Floyd L. Moreland. A summer at the LGI is almost impossible to describe; it is as much an experience as a program of study. Largely assembled from the archives of Brooklyn College, this book tells the story of the Latin/Greek Institute from its prehistory to its 50th anniversary and includes a visual history of its academics, dramatis personae, and an array of customs and traditions that have come to define this unique academic enterprise.

Lucas G. Rubin is a two-time alumnus of the Latin/Greek Institute, of which he became director in 2020. He holds a doctorate in classics from the State University of New York at Buffalo, an accomplishment made possible only by his summers spent at the Institute.

Gettysburg College is the oldest Lutheran affiliated college in the United States. At its founding in 1832, college leaders emphasized a liberal arts mission

Pennsylvania College, as it was known until 1919, numbered among its graduates many clergy, lawyers, and physicians, as well as politicians, social advocates, scientists, business executives, and university presidents. Although the college has grown considerably since World War II, its mission has remained consistent: devotion to the pursuit of truth and active citizenship. Through historic photographs, Gettysburg Collegedocuments significant themes in the college's history-- an expanding campus, the emergence and influence of athletic teams and fraternities, curricular changes, and key national events that affected the college, none of the latter more important than the Battle of Gettysburg and two world wars. Always respected for its academic program, Gettysburg College has in the past generation diversified its faculty and student body, expanded its interdisciplinary programs, and gained in reputation as a leading national liberal arts college.

First established in 1870 as a teaching college for women, Hunter College of the City of New York has provided exceptional education to all peoples for over a century.

Providing experiential learning opportunities from the very start, the college has successfully fostered many generations of students with its challenging and cutting-edge curriculum. Founder Dr. Thomas Hunter, an Irish immigrant, insisted that the school admit people of all races, religions, and ethnicities, despite segregation laws in the early years. In the 1920s, Hunter College began opening branch campuses in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. During World War II, the Bronx campus was used by the U.S. Navy as a training center for over 95,000 female volunteers for military service as WAVES and SPARS, and in 1946, it was the first site for the United Nations sessions. Over the years, alumni of Hunter have gone on to careers in politics, education, social work, medicine, media, and many other fields. Graduates have included Fulbright and Mellon Fellows and Nobel prizewinners. Here we can see for the first time hundreds of striking and nostalgic photographs that tell the story of Hunter College's development over its 150 year history.